While most stress researchers would agree that stress-provoking life crises and chronic stressful life situations both can lead to feelings of psychological distress, we know that even the most sophisticated scales of stressful events or situations explain only small percentages of observed variance in subjective mental health in community samples. For some time now it has been known that this predictive power could be increased substantially by taking into consideration individual differences in responsiveness to stress; that is, by recognizing that some people are much more vulnerable than others the emotional damage that can result from a stressful experience. However, we do not yet understand the underlying dynamics of these individual differences. The proposed work seeks to investigate patterns of differential responsiveness to stress empirically, as a way of increasing our understanding of these dynamics. This is to be done by studying a variety of existing epidemiological data sets across a consistent set of sociodemographic contrasts. Detailed study of differential responsiveness patterns across these contrasts and across a number of different stress domains will be followed by hypothesis testing aimed at differentiating contending interpretations of the patterns observed.